Proletarians! Comrades!
In France and Belgium, groups of workers threatened with the sack have kidnapped managers and threatened to blow up the factories. In China, authentic rebellions have broken out in several localities at the prospect of plants and companies being closed. In South Korea, long strikes accompanied by violent clashes with the forces of law and order have culminated in months of occupation of a car factory. In Great Britain, the unions have leaped onto the bandwagon of demonstrations in defence of endangered jobs, trying to give them a nationalist stamp which they did not originally have. In Italy, the workers at several shaky or threatened factories or job sites around the country, have made their voices heard. Meanwhile, in the United States and Japan, as in other parts of Europe and Asia, the army of the unemployed is growing constantly. Faced with these scenarios, the “experts” and the politicians strive to give the “consumers” confidence, declaring that at this point recovery is close at hand whilst in reality they have no idea which way to turn and admit that “if recovery comes” (!!!) it will nevertheless be at the cost of a further rise in unemployment.
We communists know, however, that apart from the occasional ups and downs, the crisis is destined to deepen in an increasingly dramatic fashion: on the part of the proletariat, a collective, organized and wide-ranging response must be brought into the field, capable of bearing the brunt of the next phases in the crisis of over-production of goods and capital that began in the mid’70s and has dragged on ever since, with a real haemorrhage in terms of jobs and a real massacre of proletarian forces. This is a structural crisis in the capitalist mode of production, to which capital, in its various national segments (and independently of the increasingly discredited puppets that animate the whorehouse of institutional politics, alternating in the various governments) can only react in two ways – by dealing further blows to the proletarians’ living and working conditions and by preparing a new world conflict in which the excess that has resulted from the orgy of production following the second world war can finally be burned away (goods of all sorts, amongst which are included the goods known as labour force).

Proletarians! Comrades!
Then interests of capital and those of labour do not converge or coincide:  they are opposite and antagonistic, even though for too long now a suffocating social peace has reigned everywhere, fuelled by political forces and trade unions with a long tradition and practice of opportunism. Defending our living and working conditions means becoming aware of the need and urgency of breaking this social peace, flinging it apart with all its bosses, counsellors and guardians. But this can only be done by refusing a whole series of blackmails, real rip-offs that are already being implemented or put in place: those of the salary grids, for example; those of fake strikes, discontinuous or symbolic; those of immigrant-phobia and “security packages”; those of conciliation and concerted efforts; those of democracy as the greatest good; that of company and national economy being a common treasure, to be defended with obedience and a spirit of sacrifice; those of profit-sharing as a “way of getting out of it”… all paths leading to the division of the workers, the “war of all against all”, the enfeebling of the battlefront and finally to a burning defeat – after which (watch out, proletarians!) all we can look forward to is military mobilisation, becoming cannon fodder once again, sent to defend (or attack) interests that are not ours.
“Proletarians have no fatherland,” “The proletariat is revolutionary or is nothing”, are not empty slogans. They are the essence distilled from centuries of experience. They tell us clearly that either the proletariat starts fighting for itself (and not for others) again, or capital will crush it mercilessly: there are no middle ways. They tell us clearly that open antagonism towards capital is the only way to retrieve one’s own identity, strength and determination, and to create the conditions necessary for victory.

Proletarians! Comrades!
It is not by locking ourselves in the factory (which is our prison) or climbing onto a rooftop or an overhead crane with a group of five or six people (who become “heroes” or “martyrs” for the bourgeois media-shows!), it is not by self management of a company (which belongs to us to the same extent that the rope belongs to the hanged man!) or sharing in the profits (which will anyway not be forthcoming in view of the deepening crisis), that we can escape a dramatic situation. It is only by widening the battlefront (and not spreading cheap solidarity in words), by joining up the various ongoing experiences (and not abandoning them to their own resources or to their management by forces or organizations deeply compromised with the owners), by setting up stable and lasting organisms for the struggle (as alternatives to the harness of the official trade unions and the corporativism of the various little alternative unions), by striking at capital (public or private, no matter) at the level of production (or services), by organizing all the structures necessary for bearing the clash with the owners, the State, its lackeys of all types and colours – only in this way, only by returning to the path of open class war can we defend ourselves today and counter-attack tomorrow.
In fact, it is important and vital to defend ourselves, but it is not enough.  Combative proletarians, the avant-garde of the struggle, will be forced to realize that, if only to make some minimum (but vital) gains last over time, it is necessary to set oneself the target not of keeping this rotten mode of production alive, but of violently overthrowing it, before a new worldwide slaughter unleashes its burden of blood and grieving onto the proletariat.  Capitalism came to the end of its path over a century and a half ago: its death throes are poisoning the whole world, killing the entire human species! It must be destroyed, so that out of its ruins, thanks to the proletariat seizing power and establishing its dictatorship, a new, classless society can arise.
For all this, to direct and organize immediate defence today and above all to prepare the “attack on the heavens” tomorrow, the international communist party must take root and become stronger – a militant and aware avant-garde, equipped with a programme, a long tradition of fighting opportunism and counter-revolution, tactics and a strategy tried and tested over the span of history, a solid and well-disciplined organization, the science of revolution. Combative proletarians, the avant-garde in the struggle, will understand both these necessities and be able to fight for them both, as we fight in one of the darkest ages in the history of the workers’ and communist movement, and as obscure generations of our militant comrades have fought before us.